Saskia te Nicklin at Galerie der Stadt Schwaz / Schwaz, Austria

Imagine that your loved ones have been pulled out of
your memories and sunk into a marsh. Imagine them dwelling there
for thousands of years, then rediscovered and extracted from the soil
as wrinkled bog bodies, weirdly fleshy, almost unrecognizable.
Imagine them now replaced back into your mind. Maybe as your loved
ones reappear from the dark, they somehow seem reborn. They aren’t
any more the fixed containers ’mom’ or ’dad’, ‘sister’ or
‘brother’, ‘friend’ or ‘playmate’. They’re organisms
that you look upon as if new. Perhaps the mottled surface of
their skin, their slightly zany movements and uncertain smiles
makes you feel related to them, but not weighed down by the
narratives you’ve stuck to all of your life. Differently related.
What’s changed? What’s that frivolous feeling? What’s this
blush all over your body, from your cheeks down your spine and
into your feet, as you start a brain-ride hanging out with your
unfamiliar relatives? The distance makes you want to get closer.
The power right at hand, the tinkling pleasure, as you move your
new memory-bodies around – puppets, so alive they almost explode in
your hands - a soft flow of intimacy that you didn’t expect. It
feels like you’re being moved around too, you slide into that
movement. Where’s the unease you usually connect with
lineage, inheritance, roots? Suddenly there’s life everywhere as
the bodies start bumping around, dancing in an effervescent
garden, the flowers have a stark smell, someone throws a ball, the
little doll looks uncannily at you, a fat bee circling in the air,
a hat on the ground, it´s all bursting, an agency so vulgar and
direct you can’t help but stare.

Is that your mother or a stranger right over there
in the grass?

***

In Saskia Te Nicklin’s solo exhibition ‘the
garden, some leftovers, and us swaying' we enter a fantastical
universe populated with figures and bodies in strange, ripe and
chaotic nature environments. Large drawings in watercolor are
shown alongside inventive collages on larger than human-sized
pieces of aluminum.

Four examples:

1. Drawing: A human body with light pink skin
stands looking straight at us carrying another figure, more
yellowish and animal-like, on their back. No head is visible, but
four paws hang over the carrying figure’s shoulders, like a
cape. Out of this other body’s ass, which rises like a heartshaped volcano into the sky, comes an explosion of farts looking like
peacock feathers. Chubby pink butterflies gather around the
bodies while a parade of long slugs move through the grass at their
feet.

2. Drawing: Two flower picking and faceless bodies
that seem to have been taken apart and reassembled backwards move
through a flower-field with mustardyellow gloves. They seem like
de-erotisized Hans Bellmer dolls put to work.

3. Drawing: Two joyful people jump on a third body,
squeezing out vomit and faeces from that body’s mouth and ass.
Birds, bees, frogs and slugs fly or twist around in the grass.

4. Aluminum: A huge light blue and grey figure
looks at us in panic, its hands covering its face, trying to hide
astonishment or fear. Dark mountains rise in the background. Twooversized bees and flowers keep the figure company.

Nicklin´s visual expression is both naïve and
grotesque. It’s pleasurably absurd, almost shamefully tactile.
There’s a fascination with bodily shapes and fleshy movements, the delightful ugliness of nudity, think Francis Bacon
and Lucian Freud. Yet Nicklin is less existential and much more
kitschy, playful and fantastical. Her figures might be bodies before
they are humans: A bunch of tender idiots, childlike violators,
clowns or fleshy body bags intensifying human affect: Sorrow, panic,
longing, crazy joy. These figures are gender fluid or have no gender
at all. They don’t fit into identity or family categories, yet
they seem to belong to some kind of community or family: One figure
is clutching a fat baby or maybe a doll; other figures are together,
doing things to each other or working. The surroundings are just as
significant as the bodies. We move through distorted bliss,
dystopian, voluptuous fertile landscapes. Bees and flowers are
kitschy symbols of fertility, reproduction and creation that
obsessively show up in almost every image as devoted extras. Yet
every piece has a sculptural feeling: Composite next to composite, a
strange flatness or separation into parts.

Nicklin is interested in the microcosm of the
family and the macrocosm that surrounds it. She plays with the
emotional inheritance flowing between these spaces and it’s
physical expression. She´s not scared of the most basic human
feelings: shame, anxiety, panic and tenderness. She´s not afraid of
playing with perversion and sexuality. In Blush, theorist Elsbeth
Probyn writes of shame as an affect that not only relates to guilt,
but also to interest and passion. When we are interested in
something we blush. We want this. Shame is an affect that creates
ruptures in our understandings, habits and norms. In her book
Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Perfromativity Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick has called shame infectious: it creates surprising contact
between people, a different view on oneself, on others. Maybe this
is what happens when we move around the gallery looking at Nicklin´s
bodies, bees and bursting flowers? Maybe we connect differently with
our own thoughts or think differently of the people we are close to?

The relationship between shame and family unfolds
more in Nicklin´s big aluminum pieces. Here, Nicklin’s father and
a mother exist as mythological figures adapted to the aluminum from
camera phone photos taken last summer. The father took a picture of
the mother. She instructed him. Maybe she predicted that her
daughter would like this photograph and transfer it into a new kind
of materiality ? The mother lays naked in the garden, her back turned
from the viewer, under a huge blossoming rhododendron. Is she
posing?

In order to create the majority of her big aluminum
pieces, Nicklin first paints with wood-glue on a ground of ordinary
plastic-sheets. She hovers above the ground and pours the liquid
glue onto the plastic in bodily formations. The bombastic glue, at
first transparent and jelly-like, gross and shiny, is shaped by the
texture of the lightweight plastic and the ground. There’s
friction as bodies, flowers and bees slowly come to life. Nicklin
peels the then dried glue-elements off the plastic, one piece at a
time. Some are stiff and fragile, others still more flexible. She
places them on the aluminum surfaces, assembling a sort of collage.
It’s physical work. The aluminum pieces are large – 250 x 125
cm. The dried glue-elements are still separate entities that are now
coming together in small scenes. They are not quite a ’we’, but
a community of individuals – the same way that a body is made up
by organs, intestines and limbs that function autonomously but
together are in charge of a life. Nicklin´s deliberate choice of
average materials like glue, aluminum and plastic seems important.
There´s something humbly alienating about these materials, which
provide the right resistance to Nicklin´s overall ambition:
Confronting shame, delving into intimate, personal and grand
narratives, crossing boundaries with care and imaginative force. In
the portrait of the mother, Nicklin´s method distorts the romantic
reclining nude. Like with Duchamp´s Etant Donnés - his female
shape made of hair, glass, parchment, oil paint and plastic
clothespins - Nicklin´s mother-figure is artificial and stylized.
She’s seems not to be the mother of Nicklin via their common DNA
or bloodline, but rather a relative who, as she grows to life in her
voluptuous physicality, makes us want to connect through touch or
imagination.

The aluminum pieces, which also function as
room-dividers, share motives with the drawings. Yet the size and the
weird opaque surface add something. You can’t quite see your own
reflection distinctly, but you see something. Something is moving
right there, but there’s never a clear view. Its’ not you, but
then who, or what? Maybe you get a glimpse of the other guests in
the gallery. This ambivalence stirs your attention. The surface is
not exciting, also not irrelevant. It’s dirty – with
fingerprints and traces from the work process, fissures and faults.
All of this – the dirt, the size and the plainness adds a
productive resistance to the affective and grotesque content.

There’s something shameful and wonderful about
Nicklin´s confrontation with the naked and absurdly vulnerable
bodies, the abject scenes in the paradise-like garden, the new
versions of mother and father. There’s some kind of surrender. A
open and curious engagement with the materials she’s chosen.
Maybe Nicklin knows: We can’t ever represent the body truthfully.
Every time we try to get close to a ‘real’ representation of
the bodily, we end up reinventing it as a distortion. As something
new. That’s what Nicklin is doing too. With absurd passion she
wants to connect to something – her roots, her family, her own
body. She wants to re-imagine the bodily on a greater scale, as a
material container placed in a social world bound to find its own
way when it comes to fertility and reproduction, relations between
humans and other organisms, ways of living and being together.

Text by Ida Marie Bertelsen

Ida Marie Hede Bertelsen
(b. 1980) has her education from the Forfatterskolen in 2008 and a
Mag.art in Art-history from the University of Copenhagen, and has her
MA in Aural and Visual Culture from the Goldsmith College in London.